Assessing the Publicness of Public Places: Towards a New Model

Abstract

In an urban world greatly concerned with sustainable development, building more socially cohesive, environmentally friendly and economically competitive cities appears as a key prerequisite. Through their multiple functions and various roles, public places are central to achieving urban sustainability. However, public space has been a contentious term in the academic literature and a ‘fuzzy concept’ in the practice of city-making. This paper presents the findings of a doctoral thesis, clustered around three main points: a new way of conceptualising the publicness of public space, defined as the sum of characteristics that make a public space public; a new methodology for practically assessing public places; and the testing of this methodology on three new public place case studies, created in the past three decades on the post-industrial waterfront of the River Clyde in Glasgow, UK. Publicness is understood as having a dual nature: it can be grasped simultaneously as a cultural reality and as a historical reality. Consequently, assessing the publicness of a public place comprises two steps: measuring the site against the existing standard of publicness, and explaining that measurement by exploring its development process. This approach was applied to three public places on the regenerated Clyde waterfront in Glasgow, and conclusions were drawn regarding the robustness and usefulness of the methodology.